gingerjon

The Broncos are a zombie club and have been for years. They have to exist to have bills to pay and they barely do.

Infrastructure development and soft political ties. The international development of rugby league could be a consequence. It's not an aim.

That's not what the Australian government is looking to achieve with its funding.

How many? Roughly? And why are they following Catalans as opposed to the other sports departments within their own club that are already Barcelona branded?

Before everyone starts boring on that this is some hypocrisy from the Telegraph. At least a dozen stories from the last few years about drug use in rugby union published by them.

What bills?

This is my view. It feels equivalent to Wigan playing that game at Millwall.

All the secondary ones were just quoting directly and indirectly from the Telegraph. Once the Telegraph pull it, they are essentially putting out a potentially very litigious story that they themselves have not sourced.

Has now. The Yahoo page it was on earlier as well - GONE.

We literally gerrymandered the tournament to get an England v Oz final and then England clucked it up. I’m not sure you can get more rugby league than that.

Disappointingly, someone appears to have deleted the Euro XIII pages from Wikipedia.

Do we play Ashes Tests in World Cups?

As said, if that's all it is: fine. However, if it is used to give credibility to the man who brought us Euro XIII, Franchise League (complete with club announcements and a fixture list), and Bath Gladiators withdrawing from the RFL to set up their own competition then that does become a problem. Even though all of those are jokes, they are all damaging in their own way.

Related - I've said for years that an England XIII should play a Cumbria XIII as their warm up to the Autumn internationals. This may be the only time I'm ever going to say that making that imaginary game a double header would be a good idea. England are going to be severely undercooked for what will likely be their most visible game in years. The fact that nobody in the RFL seems to remotely care about addressing that is, as ever, quite revealing.

Oh god, there was Franchise League as well, wasn't there? https://www.facebook.com/franchiserugbyleague/

If this is all it is then it's harmless. If this is another diversion that ends up making a mockery of genuine development attempts - just look at how much mental energy, if nothing else, was taken up by Euro XIII - then it becomes problematic.

This "Dean Buchan is running a real club in Valencia, has set up a rival to the RFL in Gloucestershire (etc), the Euro XIII draft will be in Atlanta" is the nonsense we had before IMG.

I quite like it. It looks like a German handball training top and there can be no higher praise.

The ghost of 2000 looms large. One of the many failures of that tournament was starting* with England v Australia and England not turning up. * I know it wasn't technically but...

There will be an opponent. Probably even some shirts to buy. But there is no real club.

No. I thought we'd buried this nonsense.

So, doable. Not with the current Rugby League Ireland-in-the-UK set-up, obviously. But eminently doable with the right people and persistence. Rugby league is a tiny sport globally - you don't need that many players to have an impact internationally.

It doesn't need to be big.

I think they are the same in that they have 50m markings not the 40m that the AFL had when they used to go on the road to undersized grounds elsewhere - but I think the suburban grounds they tend to play at have overall smaller dimensions. I do take your point that the lack of distance on kicking means players group far more than in the men's game and the resulting spectacle is not the best. It really does fall short when compared to the quality of the NRLW.

Women's AFL has 16 players, men's has 18.